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A YEAR OF MIRACLE 



A POEM IN FOUR SERMONS. 



BY. 

WfC. GANNETT. 



BOSTON : 
Geo. H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street. 
iSSS. 



Copyright, 1S81, 
y W. C. Gannett. 



UNITY CHURCH, 
St. Paul. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Treasures of the Snow 9 

II. Resurrection , 39 

III. Flowers 63 

IV. The Harvest-Secret S 7 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



I 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



If a sunset were as rare as a comet, the people 
would all be out upon the hill-tops — astrono- 
mers with their telescopes, poets with their pens, 
artists with their brushes — to capture what 
they could of it, and give it immortality. Or, 
if only once in a year the eastern skies held 
sunrise, we should be out of bed betimes that 
morning to watch the gold and crimson pa- 
geant passing up the sky. But because these 
glories face us every day, we are color-blind to 
them. Still worse with glories that are near 
as well as frequent. We envy a friend starting 
for Europe, going where there is " so much to 
see," we say. — Alps, cathedrals, and old art : 
as if a year spent in the nearest pasture would 
not crowd our mind with miracles, if only we 
had eyes to see with ! 

u Hast thou entered into the treasures of the 
snow?" Probably not: for he who asked the 



10 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



question spoke of a treasure-chamber, rare in 
Bible lands, but opened to us anew with each 
December; open all the winter long; oj;>ened 
in every door-yard and at every window-pane: 
and. a palace so common and so near as that is 
not a palace to eyes that chiefly love the far 
things and the rare. But, if only once in many 
years those wondrous treasure-chambers were 
unlocked, how we should hand down the tradi- 
tion, — like men who, having caught one glimpse 
of some new 3Iexico, should prattle of an El 
Dorado all their lives ! At Beaufort in South 
Carolina, the whole population, black and Avhite, 
turned out one winters day to see — a frozen 
pond ! A northern teacher, dying on one of 
the Sea Islands there in slavery-time, was en- 
shrined in the memory of her southern friends 
by a snow-fall, that happened to float down on 
the north wind just after the stranger had been 
laid in her fresh grave : it seemed like a flight 
of friendly angels from her home-land, because, 
like angels' visits, its comings were so few and 
far between. The Siamese 2} rmce heard of 
"solid water" with complete unfaith, — a mira- 
cle too great for even Oriental credence. And 
in Abyssinia, far under the tropic sky, Bruce, 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



11 



the hunter for the sources of the Nile, came to a 
village where 

" An old man told him, with a grave surprise 

Which made his childlike wonder almost grand 
How, in his youth, there fell from out the skies 

A feathery whiteness over all the land, — 
A strange, soft, spotless something, pure as light, 

For which their questioned language had no name, — 
That shone and sparkled for a day and night, 

Then vanished all as weirdly as it came ; 
Leaving no vestige, gleam, or hue or scent 

On the round hill or in the purple air, 
To certify their mute bewilderment 

That such a presence had indeed been there ! " 

And they had named their village from that 
one unprecedented snow-fall. Thus, men stand 
in awe before the snow where its treasures are 
rare. 

In the Hebrew land it was by no means so 
unheard of. It glistens on the top of Hermon, 
and lies deep in the high ravines of Lebanon, 
until the summer is far advanced ; and, unless 
the climate be changed, Jesus, when a hoy, had 
chances to make snow-balls now and then on 
the hill-tops around Xazareth. Yet, in that 
grand drama of Job in which God asks the man 
our c.-acsticn. "Hast thou Entered into the treas- 



12 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



ures of the snow?' 5 it is ranked among the 
major wonders. — with the morning stars and 
the sea, with the lightnings and Leviathan and 
death. Majestic grouping, is it not? But, after 
all, the morning-stars and the lightnings and 
death belong to the every-days; and the writer 
mentions also the dew and the rain and the wild 
goats, and the young ravens hungry in the win- 
ter. — things small and common enough'. Per- 
haps in his case it was not so much the rareness 
that made the appreciation, hut that he had 
poeVs eyes to see with. The poet is the man 
with double vision, one who is at once near- 
sighted and far-sighted, who sees the closer 
things as wonders because he sees their far re- 
lations too. TThere we say " poet,"' we might 
say simply " seer." 5 At all events, this Bible- 
poet, phrasing a question for God's lips, phrases 
it fitly for the God of Xature to ask. I hear it 
uttered thus: c; Thou seest the pebble, the rain- 
drop, the grass-blade, the dust-mote, the snow- 
flake: hast thou entered into their treasures? I 
make my worlds out of them ! " 

To-day, again, the question lies written on the 
ground in our fresh snow-fall. We will accept 
its invitation, and try to enter in a little way. 



TREASUKKS OK 'J II K SNOW. 



13 



The colors of the spring dawn slowly, the 
color of the winter in an hour, — when all is 
ready. Not until all is ready. A night, away 
back in October, set^ a frosty seal upon the 
grass and trees; and Nature knows the sign 
and begins to unrobe her for the sleep. Her 
colors, dropping back from green through yel- 
low, orange, and the reds, fade at last to browns 
and russets; and then she rustles into naked- 
ness. Just when she is lying down, the Indian 
season comes, and with a gentle dream of sum- 
mer she drowses into death. The birds have 
flown; the flowers, too. The ferns and vines, 
the little children of the woodlands, have van- 
ished to their secret nurseries underground. The 
hills grow bleak and bare ; the fields roughen 
into ridge and furrow; and broken stalks, and 
the stones, hidden since the May-days, stand 
stiffly out again in sight. The trees now stand 
forlorn with empty nests, — " bare, ruined choir-, 
where late the sweet birds sang." Their toss- 
ing arms lash the ground with wild, black shad- 
ows through the windy, moonlit nights. The 
cold increases; the winds search and whistle 
and sting; the pools skim over of a morning; 
the cattle huddle in the field ; the fowls stand 



1-i A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 

drearily in the lee of the bush ) faces redden on 
the street; and, under the stars, fire-light gleams 
through the window-panes. 

Meanwhile, the home-life deepens. As a 
friend once said to me, the seasons indoors 
seem to just reverse the order of the outward 
seasons. As the leaves are fading in the fall, 
we feel within our bodies and our minds a brac- 
ing spring / plans gather vigor, and we bend 
ourselves for the hard work of the year. The 
winter brings heart and mind to their full force 
of growth. Nature's winter is the human sum- 
mer-time. Then, spring begins to make us lan- 
guid. And the busy summer of earth-life brings 
to ourselves a pause and rest and comparative 
•inaction, like an inward winter. Reckoning this 
way by the spirit's calendar, Thanksgiving Day 
is Easter ; and the Easter is Thanksgiving Day 
for a winter's inward harvests ; for then we 
shall have gathered in and barned away in 
memory what we have read and thought and 
done in our growing hours, while the snow lay 
outside on the ground. 

So, as Nature is getting ready for what may 
happen out of doors, indoors it is all astir. 
Hands oftener meet other hands in works of 



TREASURES OF THE snow. 



15 



service, and hearts are closer drawn to hearts. 
The books come forth in the long evenings, the 
story-telling begins, the fathers and mothers 
gather the children around their knees by the 
cheerful blaze, — that blaze itself the sunshine 
of old springs and summers in the far-off past. 
Over all within, without, is God, who careth 
for us thus; who made those summers of old 
and stored their heat, who is preparing now 
the seasons of our immortality. At last, all is 
ready. 

As we sit and work, or sit and dream, a day 
comes in which a stillness falls. A hush is on 
the earth ; a gray sky is overspread above ; an 
uneasiness is in the air which is not wind. Go 
to the window and watch. A few heralds clad 
in white come floating down, turning this way, 
turning that way, like scouts seeking for paths 
and camping-places. Then, of a sudden, the 
thick, dull sky is alive with trooping forms! 
The ways of the air are filled with the army of 
the Snow ! Their tread is not with sound, but 
second by second they arrive, and alight, and 
possess themselves of the hills and the hollows. 
The fields grow silent and white with their 
gleaming camp. Whole States are changed in 



16 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



a few hushed moments ; and no stone, no twig, 
no cranny, is forgotten. Only the all-enclosing 
air could do it ; and the air has done it ! The 
signs of human parting and projDerty are blotted 
out in indiscriminate conquest as Nature seizes 
again on her old patrimony of the earth, ignor- 
ing man who has marked out his farms upon it. 
All the men of the land in armies could not 
work such uniform obliteration in a year. All 
the men of the land, as builders, could not fash- 
ion in a century such rare and universal archi- 
tecture as the hurrying wind and snow build up 
together on tree and house and rock and fence 
and everything that offers niche or pedestal. 

How they come trooping down ! Hour after 
hour we watch, and still the host comes march- 
ing in, — now in steady, downright phalanxes, — 
now swerving, whole solid columns, in rapid 
flanking movements, — now in little whirling 
charges dashing in from this side and from that 
in furious melee. 

And each of the mighty army is clad in crys- 
tal panoply. Let us waylay some of the strag- 
glers, and examine them. That crystal panoply 
is our first " treasure." The captives are by no 
means clad alike, however. Upwards of a thou- 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



17 



sand differing forms of snow-flakes have been ob- 
served. I have seen a book containing some 
two hundred of them figured. Here are simple 
prisms, three-sided or six-sided. Here are E 
tiny pyramids one-thirtieth of an inch in height, 
yet as mathematically perfect in their lines as 
the Great Pyramid of Egypt in its best estate. 
And here are prisms capped with the pyramids. 
]\lore familiar to us are these star-like forms ; 
Lnt verily, as with the stars above, one differ- 
eth from another in its glory. The simplest is 
this wherein six prisms radiate from a centre, 
like wheel-spokes from a hub. Then, on both 
spokes and hub Nature sets to work to play her 
variations. Each ray, beset on either side with 
tinier prisms, takes on the semblance of a fern- 
leaf; and the species seem to vary in outline 
as the fern-species vary in the summer woods. 
That centre, which I ignobly called the "hub," 
enlarges to a six-sided plate, or often is itself 
a star whose glittering arms stem off to be 
tipped with little trefoils or rosettes. Here 
lies a star within a star, and that within an- 
other star, and all within a fourth ! Some of 
these centres are wrought in finest open-work, 
others are filled white to the rim ; but under the 



13 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



microscope we could see these last all fretted 
over with fairy hieroglyphics, silvery mosaics 
marked off in triangles and hexagons. In one 
variety the crossing prisms make you think 
of the child's puzzle, where the little wooden 
blocks lock together into a tight nest. An- 
other form seems different from all the rest: 
it is a star set at each end of a prism like the 
two wheels on an axle-tree. Up in the Polar 
seas, Dr. Scoresby one day found his ship's 
deck covered three inches deep with such little 
air-chariots. 

But these dainty forms, and this variety in 
their daintiness, are not the only treasures of 
the snow-flake. Through all that variety runs 
identity. The flakes are akin in their deeper 
being, as negro and Esquimaux, cannibal and 
Quaker, are yet all one in human nature. Snow- 
nature is bound by a law of sixes. The sides of 
every prism and pyramid meet at one angle, — 
that of 60°, — or its multiples : the rays of every 
star diverge at that one angle : every vein upon 
those little fern-leaves joins its stem at that one 
angle, or its multiples. The stars are all six- 
rayed, or rarely twelve ; the centres all hexag- 
onal. Watch the flakes of a whole winter's 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW* 10 

storms, climb Ghimborazo, go to the Pole, or 
make your mimic snow-storm for yourself inside 
a chemist's bottle, — never will you find a fin- 
ished star with five rays or with seven, or with 
that law of the angles broken. The rays them- 
selves are broken, but never that creative law. 
Bruised, shattered, huddled together, the snow- 
flakes reach us ; but through all bruise and 
shatter that law of " sixes " lies plain upon them. 
By that they are born and live and die. 

Is it not very impressive and awe-ful, — these 
mathematics carried down to the microscopic 
measurements, these " ethics of the dust,*' as 
Buskin calls them, — the grand legislation of 
the universe laid thus upon its invisible atoms ! 

Now, who can explain such wondrous birth 
and fashioning? Shall Ave answer for the snow- 
flake what George MacDonald makes the baby 
answer for itself? — 

" AVhere did you come from, baby dear ? 
Out of the everywhere into here! 

" How did it all just come to be you 7 
God thought about me, — and so I grew! 

" Where did you get that pearly ear ? 
God spoke, and it came out to hear!" 



20 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



Did God look, and the snow-flake come out to 
be looked at ? Somewhat so would the old 
Genesis and Psalm- writers of the eastern land 
have solved the problem. The answer then 
was simple, — "He saith to the snow, Be thou 
upon the earth." Somewhat thus would the 
poets and the religious feeling of every land 
and time solve it, our own as much as all the 
rest. Did we wish to be a little more knowing, 
we might answer, " The air was full of va- 
por, and the thermometer fell to 32°, and so, of 
course, it snowed." Of course, it did; but did 
you ever think of it ? — " of course " is our 
appeal to the unsolved mystery, the Course of 
Nature. 

The scientific men, however, who go dredging 
in those deeps of mystery bring up, at least, a 
guess. They tell us that all substances (solid 
granite and hard iron as well as lightest gas) 
consist of atoms suspended in an ether, an ether 
that is ever thrilling with invisible vibrations of 
heat and light and electricity. To their eyes, 
the universe, through and through, is in unceas- 
ing motion. And when we say, "the thermom- 
eter falls," what we mean, in brief, is this : the 
water-atoms, while the water is in the form 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



21 



of vapor, move loosely, freely, distantly; but, 
as the cold increases, this heat-dance slackens, 
and the atoms gradually close together, until 
the vapor, changing form, becomes a "liquid"; 
with still greater cold, the atoms keep on .ap- 
proaching one another, until by a second trans- 
formation they are — -not fast-locked, by any 
means — but faster-locked, into what we call the 
M solid " form, — and thus the snow is born ! 

And it is by a measured march that the vapor- 
atoms have thus closed and coalesced. Each 
Lilliputian knows his place, and like a veteran 
soldier moves in rhythms to his post within the 
flake. In rhythms : the Egyptian sculptures 
show us pictures of the way in which the great 
stones of their pyramids were dragged, in that 
day before the engines had appeared. Five 
hundred men are seen tugging at the ropes and 
rollers ; but, to secure the pull together which 
alone would move the block, there stands among 
them a musician playing on an instrument. And 
the stones are thus drawn by music to their 
courses in the pyramid. Now fancy the water- 
vapor atoms marching in, — through the billionth 
of an inch, invisible hosts to inaudible music — 
to build up the snow-flake ! What time they 
keep ! 



2 2 



A YEAR OK MIRACLE. 



But whence comes that variety in building- 
plans, — now star, now prism, and now pyramid ? 
Doubtless from some difference in temperature, 
or in the amount of vapor in the air, or in the 
rush-rate of the storm. In still days, with the 
temperature not far below the freezing-point, the 
stars fall large and fair. The stars that fall from 
Llinnesota skies are, on the average, much more 
perfect than those that light upon the sea-coasts. 
Dr. Kane describes the snow that wraps the 
scanty vegetation near the Pole as a three-layered 
blanket : first, a light and air-filled layer in the 
early winter ; then, the solid, tight-packed crys- 
tals of mid-winter ; then, another porous stratum 
in the spring. We will not say, with one Avho 
called our admiration to the snow-flake a hun- 
dred years ago, that " the more common forms 
are due to temperature, etc., but for the infinite 
variety of types we must go to the will and 
pleasure of the Great First Cause." For the 
flower rare here lives somewhere as the weed, 
the exception here is somewhere the rule ; and 
the weed, the rule, the e very-day miracle re- 
mains the miracle. The next snow-flake will 
startle us, if we can only see it as it is. 

How big or, rather, how little are those atoms, 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



23 



is our natural wonder, as we hear such state- 
ments made. They have never yet been seen; 
they are merely guessed at to explain certain 
phenomena that are seen; so that their size, 
or want of size, is rather problematical. But 
the calculators have tried their best. After dif- 
ferent methods of approximation, Sir William 
Thomson, the great English mathematician an- 
nounced his provisional answer thus : If a drop 
of water should he magnified to the size of 
the earth, — one drop swollen to the planet's 
size, — then the constituent molecules of that 
drop would probably be larger than shot, and 
probably smaller than cricket-balls! When you 
have taken this in thoroughly, then remember 
that each molecule of water is itself compounded 
of atoms more minute of oxygen and hydrogen. 
Did I not rightly say " hosts,", to hint the census 
of the snow-flake ? To watch a dew-drop gather 
on a grass-blade, and whiten into frost, is as if 
one standing on a mountain-top were watching 
the muster of a mighty army in the dim lands 
far below. 

Even if this atomic theory were known to ho 
certain fact, instead of being merely to-day's 
wisest guess, have we explained the snow-llake 



24 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



yet ? Hardly more than by our bare thermom- 
eter statement. We have only moved our " of 
course " a little farther back, where still the 
mystery remains. What, and whence, are the 
atoms ? How came each to know its place and 
be able to move in rhythms to it ? And by 
what force impelled. ! 

Remember that no particle of moisture is 
debarred this transfiguration. The broad ocean 
and the land-locked, pond and. the roadside pool 
may all be one in destiny, because one in their 
origin. Xo ditch so grimy with reeking poison 
but its vapor, mounting, may take on the form 
of stars and become a pure and white-winged, 
wonder of the air. However j)oor its earth-lot, 
this heaven awaits it. Could, we question every 
flake that wanders to our window-ledge about 
its past, we should, hear a mingled, song like that 
the Christians fancy of the hosts before the 
throne of God.: — 

I came from oft mid-ocean, 

I in a wild-flower lay, 
I came from a brook on a mountain-side, 

And I from Niagara's spray ; 
And I was a tear in a mother's eyes 

For a little one gone away. 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



25 



What histories they could tell, what gospels <>f 
beauty preach, these little stars, if they could 
"sing together" to our hearing! Ami all share 
in the glory and the song, whether destined for 
the slow-dying glacier, or Lorn to flutter for an 
instant, light upon the stream, and vanish. 

We have entered only one of the treasure- 
chambers. We will not go through all. The 
Pope's palace, the Vatican, has over four thou- 
sand rooms. I know not how many we might 
expect to find in this tiny house not made with 
hands. 

But let us linger a moment to think of the 
physical power involved in an inch-deep snow- 
storm. The amount of heat absorbed and lib- 
erated would work the engines of the world. 
First, think what masses of water have to he 
raised as vapor from the ocean-top, and drifted 
far and wide across the lands, to prepare that 
even gray sky which made us say, " It is going 
to snow," — and try to conceive or calculate the 
heat absorbed in that operation. Then think of 
the snow that covers all the State an in eh deep 
in an hour, and try to conceive or calculate the 
amount of heat liberated in this reverse opera- 
tion as the vapor falls back not only to the 



26 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



liquid, but the solid state. Let me state it thus, 
calculating from some of TyndalFs figures: A 
boy grasps a handful from the fence-top and pats 
it to a ball, weighing half a pound, — intending it 
for his friend a few yards off. But the force 
employed to make from water-vapor that snow 
of which he made his ball, would fling a ball 
weighing one hundred pounds two-thirds of a 
mile into the air. The force employed to make 
the half-pound of water-vapor out of the original 
oxygen and hydrogen would fling a hundred- 
pound ball nearly five miles into the air! That 
force summoned to make one half-pound of 
snow ! Then think of the engines at work to 
make the whole snow-storm ! Think of the 
might, as well as tenderness, it took to press 
those few frost-flowers upon your window-panes! 
TTou did not dream what strong hands lurked 
in your bed-chamber through the winter night. 

The color of the snow is another of its treas- 
ures. To enter into that, we must open the door 
of the rainbow chamber, where we should see, 
besides the snow, such things as the white clouds 
and the ocean spray and the crests of breaking 
waves, and learn how in all of them the ravelled 
purism-colors are woven into white again. It is 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



27 



the mingling* of the infinitely many refleetions 
that flash from the sides and angles of the tiny 
prisms and pyramids and stars that make the 
dazzling whiteness. Crush the transparent Lee, 
and its grains will whiten also, for the same 
reason. 

And we will crush it, for we ought not to pass 
by the wondrous structure of the ice without a 
word of awe. Ice is simply a solid firmament, 
so to speak, of snow-stars ; a fossil forest, as it 
were, of the snow-fern leaves, of that silvery 
foliage with which by winter moonlight every 
window grows to a leafy bower of air-plants. 
Ask Tyndall to send a beam of sunlight through 
a block of ice, and place a lens in front, so as to 
catch a magnified image of what happens uii his 
screen. As in the night-heavens, when a wind 
sweeps the clouds away, suddenly the stars ap- 
pear, so here within the ice-slab first one star, 
then another, looks out at us ; then the constel- 
lations thicken; and, as the process goes on, the 
rays begin to change to petals, and presently 
the screen is covered with the fern-leaves. As 
if some night, while we watched those old con- 
stellations in the sky, they should begin t<> ar- 
range themselves in blossom-forms before our 



28 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



eyes. It is only melting ice. What has hap- 
pened ? Let Tyndall himself tell: "Silently 
and symmetrically the crystallizing force built 
the atoms up, silently and symmetrically the 
sunbeam has taken them down. What beauty 
latent in a block of common ice ! And only 
think of lavish Nature operating thus through- 
out the world. Every atom of the solid ice 
which sheets the frozen lakes of the north has 
been fixed according to this law. Nature ' lays 
her beams in music, 5 and it is the function of 
science to purify our organs, so as to enable us 
to hear the strain." 

Will you step once more to the window, and 
watch the snow come down? How the flakes 
drift and whirl and dart and light and whirl 
again ! If ever chance, if ever chaos, then here. 
And yet we know it must be fact that not one 
motion of the little Arabs but happens under 
eternal law ; that not one flies or loiters save as 
the steady forces guide it; that every one is 
poised to its final -place as surely as if angel- 
hands had set out with it from heaven. Like 
the kindred host above, God calleth them all by 
name, and appointeth each its place. 

No wind blows but God knows ; 
No atom falls but God calls. 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



20 



The storm looks like riot : it is a kind of quiet. 
It looks like chaos : it is perfect cosmos, It 
makes us think of chance; and chance, when we 
really think of it, resolves itself into unknown 
depths on depths of law ! 

I have spoken of a few of the treasures which 
we careless ones seldom think of as lying hidden 
in our common snow: of the gradual preparation 
of the seasons for it ; of the beauty of the flakes, 
and their variety of forms, and of the identity 
running through all that variety; of their secret 
architecture, guessed at, never seen; of the 
power necessary to bring and build the atoms 
so ; of the careful glory thus in waiting for all 
waters, although the transfiguration may not 
outlast an instant ; of the kinship of the ice to 
the heaven-spaces ; and of the order in the riot 
of the storm. The story would grow long, if we 
should try to even hint the itses of the snow : to 
tell how glaciers have planed and moulded and 
ground the continents into readiness for man ; 
how the polar snows send us out the air and 
water-currents, those mighty vehicles on which 
the seasons go riding around the planet ; how 
the snow-mountains are the nurseries of the 
rivers; how the winter-lands have been hi his- 



30 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



tory the homesteads of strong, young races, that 
from time to time freshened the earth with men; 
and how the snow-storms take care of all our 
northern vegetation, wrapping it from cold, 
while the hidden life within gets ready for its 
resurrection. 

But all this we pass by. Sight-seeing, as 
every traveller knows, is about the hardest 
work a man can do. Let us draw ourselves 
away, and for a moment think over two or 
three thoughts that the treasures thus far seen 
arouse of him who is their Lord. 

The first thought of all must needs be, — Then 
there is nothing common, nothing trifling, noth- 
ing un-wonderful in this universe! Beauty far 
off ! Sights in Europe ! Why, here, now, all 
around us, under our feet, in the air, the weed 
springing up unbidden in our flower-pot, the bit 
of spar or sea-shell on our mantel-piece, the 
paving stone we rattle over, the most familiar, 
unsightliest, deadest thing that we can name, 
has more of God in it than we can ever see. 
Explain it away, and we have only explained 
a way through it to deeper marvels beyond. 
44 Nothing common or unclean ! " we may well 



TREASURES OF THE -Now. 



31 



say, taught by the wonder of the great sheet, let 
down, like Peter's in the vision, through the 
winter air. 

Clustered around the- old cathedrals abroad, 
you often see old wooden houses leaning up 
against the sculptured walls, like ragged children 
about the knees of a great, beautiful saint. We 
say well that the shanty is unfair compared with 
the cathedral. But that is only true so far as 
man's part is concerned. Look at God's part in 
each : the wood-cells and fibres in the shanty's 
walls, grown by the laws of plant-life, show 
structure even more complex and marvellous 
than the white crystals built up into the shining 
temple. Nothing common or unclean! 

Truly see the contents of any bit of time or 
space, and we feel with William Blake that 

" We see a World in a grain of sand, 
And a Heaven in a wild-flower, 
Hold Infinity in the palm of our hand, 
And Eternity in an hour !" 

To this thought, that nothing is insignificant 
when really seen, joins on a second, — of the 
large place in the universe which the little 
things hold. Nay, when we think of it, every- 
thing resolves itself to littles. Nature is noth- 



32 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



ing but little things. The mountain becomes 
motes of silex and calcium, the ocean single 
drops of water, the prairie single grains of 
alumina, the human body single cells, human life 
single thoughts and feelings and impulses. And 
earth, air, lire, water, become, in turn, atoms of 
oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and the rest. There 
is no stopping-place. When you have summed 
up what God does by means of his " little things," 
and, for the most part, in utter silence, there 
will be nothing left to -think of. 

The Mahometans have a story that once, 
when Abraham had been wronged by the 
hunter, Nimrod, Jehovah befriended the patri- 
arch, and told him to select the animal that 
should be sent to punish his enemy. Abraham 
chose the fly. And Jehovah said, " If Abraham 
had not chosen the fly, I should have sent a 
creature, of whom a thousand would not weigh 
as much as a fly's wing." 

We often say that God is infinitely great. 
We instinctively look up to heaven when we 
pray. And doubts often beset us, because, to 
our thought, he seems too large and too remote 
to be our God, — to care for me. That is true : 
God is the infinitely great and infinitely remote ; 



TREASURKS OF THE BNOW. 



sa 



but every whit as truly lie is the infinitely little, 
and so the infinitely close. God the infinitely 
little! Pray to him! I do not mean that Ave 
can find out him; but I think it does help to 
make us feel that the Great Life is near. 

Think of the crystals in which the sap of 
your trees is lying locked through all this win- 
try weather, — sap-crystals locked in cells which 
are themselves invisible to the unaided eye. 
God stands inside those crystals, holding their 
atoms fast, — just as much as in the stars! 

Think how that sap will be running through 
the hidden channels next June, and out to the 
tips of waving leaves, and, in its mimic tides, 
sweeping round and round the grains of green 
chlorophyl ; so that, when we pluck a leaf and 
bold it in our hand, we shall really bold a little 
sea with throbbing life in it. God stands and 
listens to the dashings of those hidden tides! 
Does not that help us a little to imagine one 
who "measures the water in the hollow of his 
band," and listens to " the music of the spheres " ? 

Think of the corpuscles in our human blood, 
of which it is calculated that seventy billions 
(some seventy times the population of the globe) 
lie in a cubic inch: — the Power has counted 



34 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



them ! Does it not help a little to make real 
the thought of One who " sitteth on the circle 
of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as 
grasshoppers, and the nations as the small dust 
of the earth ; who calleth the stars by names, 
and not one f aileth " ? 

Or, once more, think of the creatures that 
play in a single drop of ditch-water as the 
whales play in the Atlantic. Each one of those 
creatures has its j>erfect structure, its finished 
anatomy, its instincts and its wants, and those 
wants provided for, its little hungers and rages, 
its fatigues and rests, its pains and pleasures, 
and at last its death, — who knows but its im- 
mortality also? Thinking of such things, we 
begin to feel that perhaps the truth is God is 
not too far off, but too near for us to see. And 
God in all, God through all, becomes the living 
fact. 

And the more the universe has widened to us 
by the aid of those curved bits of glass that we 
call telescope and microscope, and the more 
the unknown has become the known, always 
and everywhere Order, Beauty, Law we find. 
Always Cosmos, never a sign of Chaos, never 
an atom fallen out of the All-Ruling Hands! 



TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 



No chance anywhere, not even in the seeming 
riot of the storm. No " miracle anywhere, 
no breaking of a law; hut all a miracle more 
real by being law. Oneness everywhere ! The 
laws that round the planets rounding the dew- 
drop: gravitation in the snow-flake's flutter and 
in the rush of suns. All the recent discoveries 
and guesses of science are but different ]>aihs 
by which we approach grander points of view, 
whence we can look and see what it means to 
say that God is One. This is the unity of Nat" 
ure, that "one God," to whose recognition the 
])rophets of science are gladly leading us. One- 
ness from rims to centre of the universe, — rims 
that are nowhere, centre that is everywhere! 
And nothing little, nothing trifling; for all is 
full of God ! 

It is hard to prove a God; harder to prove 
him our God ; harder still, perhaps, to prove 
our immortality. Yet a sense as if there were 
nothing but God everywhere deepens in us, as 
we enter into the treasures of the snow. Like 
snow, we, too, become a moment's vision, then 
we melt and vanish ; but I am willing to trust 
for life and love while I know that the Power 
and Beauty which moulds the snow-flake is 
around me and is in me. 



36 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



Verily, as we watch the white star that has 
fluttered from the heavens to our hand, we may 
say, " The Lord is in his holy temple : let our 
hearts keej) silence before himl" 



RESURRECTION. 



n. 



RESURRECTION. 

It is the Resurrection season, and the glad 
word itself shall be our theme to-day. We will 
simply say it over and over, and listen to the 
echoes which it raises among our thoughts. It 
is the word in which the twins, Death and Life, 
declare themselves to he not two, but one ; 
and the echoes, although vague, must needs be 
strong and musical, and they will bring us hints 
from far. 

Xot all from afar, however: the echo which 
reaches us first, from the hills and fields, sounds 
near. 

Very beautiful, was it not ? that picture of 
the opening spring-time which I gathered from 
our Bible, catching here a glimpse and there a 
glimpse as it lies reflected in the song of psalm- 
ist and prophet, and of Jesus, who had so often 
watched it as a boy on the hills of Galilee. 
Doubtless he used to go out to gather early 
lilies and note the green garments of the fresh 
young grass. Ten million million tiny strug- 



*0 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



glers on our hills and in our fields to-day are 
trying to show us that ours, too, is Holy Land. 
The flowers have begun to greet us in our walks, 
— dumb angels, with faces all a-shine with the 
glad tidings that the Savior-season hath arisen. 

Winter we call the death of the year. Its 
white suggests the shroud ; its silence the hush 
of the saddened house ; its evenness of aspect 
the blank uniformity of loss ; its cold and voice- 
less, yet potent, influence the spell that absence 
of things dear and wonted lays on us. Yet to 
what a miracle of life does all this tend! The 
swathing and the silence and the rest only hide 
the inward processes by which the earth, in its 
white chrysalis, is preparing itself for motion 
and color and sound. 

How certain it is, this Resurrection of the 
spring! Some one reminds us that, as the har- 
vest approaches, the world is annually within 
a month or two of actual starvation. Let one 
single spring-time drop from out the roll of 
seasons, and another would look on an earth 
full of silent cities and very quiet villages, wait- 
ing for new populations, — for some provident 
Noah to wander by that way and settle with his 
family. 



REST K 1 1 1''.('T I OX. 



41 



How punctual, too ! Winter maybe cold or 
warm, may linger or haste away, or turn back 
and growl us out a snowy good-bye a month 
after we were thinking he had gone, — but it 
makes little difference, after all. The heralds 
soon arrive, and then the gay procession of life 
marches in in order. We can predict the com- 
ing banners, can date the passing weeks by 
flower-arrivals and departures, can count the 
quick hours by flower-wakings and flower-clos- 
ings. Emerson is but a trifle too precise : — 

• 

" The calendar 
Of the painted race of flowers, 
Exact to days, exact to hours, 
Is faithful through a thousand years ; 
And the pretty almanac 
Shows the punctual coming back 
On their due days of the birds." 

And how nearly universal the Resurrection 
is! The green, tide comes pouring up from 
the south, pressing over the hills and running 
through the river-valleys, and presently not one 
inch that can wear green but is bathed in the 
living glory. The trees, swelling witli buds, 
set their brown nets in its path, and soon the 
meshes are full of crinkled leafage and the 



42 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



white and crimson of the blossoms ; and mosses 
wake and steal into their rooty arms, and the 
vines creep up their bodies. ~No secret place is 
left unvisited by Spring. The lone plant in a 
desert, the seed buried under a dead leaf in the 
wood or prisoned in the crevice of a city pave- 
ment, the stick-dry bush we hung up in the cel- 
lar last November out of sight, the very pota- 
toes in the barrel, — all hear the whisper and 
feel the touch and turn to life again. Within 
the room of a sick girl, in a foul city-garret, 
stands a solitary rose in an earthen pitcher, cut 
off, like a caged bird, from the companionship 
of kin. The Spring, flying over, knows the 
spot, stops, and bids the plant and the sick one 
turn again to life and beauty. She works for 
no eyes. She works for all eyes. The green 
deep of the forest, the deep of your little parlor- 
fernery, turning now to a tropical jungle, — both 
are alike to her; and all her work is finished 
with equal exquisiteness. 

Where she cannot go in one shape, she startles 
in another. Here, among us, her presence is an 
even leafing of the temperate zone, beneath a 
brightening sun. Northward, closer to the pole, 
there comes a rapid dash of day and spring and 



RESURRECTION. 



43 



summer all in one, as slie watches her chance 
to fling green among the snows. Elsewhere, it 
needs a dimming sun to bring her. In inner 
California, through long, rainless months of heal, 
the roots and bulbs lie dormant underneath the 
earth's burnt crust, just as with us they hide 
beneath the frozen earth of winter, while only 
thick-rinded, juicy evergreens linger above the 
desert's surface, — matching the firs and pines 
amid our snows. There the Resurrection season 
comes as the coolest of the year. The rain sets 
in, the desert-crust grows cool and soft, and 
suddenly, as if the rain had touched them with 
a magic torch, the plains are lit with color ! 

In the still drier tropics, she will come, if she 
can come no other way, down the sun-baked 
channel of an empty river, — the spring-time 
that the traveller, Baker, saw far up one of the 
great branches of the Nile. He tells us how his 
jDarty had been travelling weary days through 
the plains of Upper Egypt. Everything was 
death-stricken with the heat : no grass, no 
green ; the water of the river had shrunken to 
little lakes, a mile or two long, lying scattered 
here and there along the dry bed. And these 
pools swarmed and throbbed with the concen- 



44 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



trated life of the big river ; the fish, the croco- 
diles and hippopotamuses crowding there to- 
gether in unhappy families. One night, when 
the men were camped as usual in the sandy 
channel, he heard a dull and distant noise. It 
grew loud and louder. It woke the Arabs up, 
who knew the sound and sprang to their feet 
shouting, " The river ! The river ! " and scram- 
bled for the banks. And then they heard the 
River come, — marching down through the night 
on its journey to the sea! When the morning 
broke, a yellow flood, hundreds of yards across, 
rolled at their feet in what at night had been 
a dry and sunken pathway through the desert. 
Far away, up in the mountains, the rainy season 
had begun, and thus sent greeting to the plains. 
In two days, the face of the whole country had 
changed around the travellers. Water was all 
that the solitary place needed to make it blos- 
som like a garden. The mimosa-trees budded 
on the banks, the birds found their way with 
singing to the branches, the deer came down in 
companies to drink, the green spread and deep- 
ened like a dye ; and it was spring ! 

Thus, everywhere, in one form or another, — 
under ground, dissolving minerals for the suck- 



RESURRECTION. 



ing rootlets, — mounting through a million secret 
tubes inside young stems and solid trees, — de- 
scending from the skies in sunshine and in show- 
ers, — riding on the rivers, — comes Spring, the 
Savior-season in the gladness of the Insurrection. 

We will turn from the fields and listen to an- 
other echo of that word, — one that comes from 
the heavens that bend above them. What maJa s 
this miracle of spring? Where does the spring- 
force come from? And whither go, when the 
leaves drop and the flowers pass away? How 
explain this steady swing of seasons by which 
alternate life and death sweep like a rising, then 
an ebbing, tide over the planet, so certainly, 
so punctually, so universally? 

In Greece, six hundred years before Christ's 
day, still earlier farther east, wise men perceived 
something like the truth, that matter and force 
are eternal, that the words "creation" and k% an- 
nihilation*' have no meaning. They said that 
something never comes from nothing, never ends 
in nothing; and they framed philosophies ac- 
cordingly. But for ages this remained a philos- 
opher's idea. Xot till within a century of our 
own time have the chemists proved by expert 



46 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



ments with weight and measure that no atom of 
matter is ever really lost ; that everything which 
vanishes only vanishes from sight, to enter into 
new combinations and exist as truly as before. 
And not till within the last few years has an- 
other fact begun to secure its proof, — that 
not only what we call " matter " is thus inde- 
structible, but also what we call " force " is 
imperishable; since heat and light, electricity 
and magnetism, chemic and vital force, are all of 
them but varying forms of one and the same 
great force. The " correlation of forces," — so its 
discoverers have named the mighty secret which at 
last reveals to us the depths of meaning in man's 
old word, " uni-verse." Correlated forces, — that 
is to say, each one dies into the others whe?i it 
disappears as itself: one sole Force abiding as 
the " I AM." In uttering that, we stand in the 
very heart, the inmost miracle, of the Resurrec- 
tion process ! 

Take any common movement that we have 
ceased to wonder at, thinking we know all about 
it ; trace it back and see the dyings of force 
from one form and its rebirths in another. You 
have a clock on the mantel-piece in your parlor. 
Whence get the hands of the clock their mo- 



RESURRECT I ox. 



47 



tion ? From the force of gravitation in the 
leaden weights or of elasticity in the - 
spring. Whence came that force into the 
weights or- spring? Out of your contracting 
muscles as they wound it up. So the power is 
already outside of the clock, and in your arm. 
Whence came this vital, muscular force into 
your arm ? It is the chemic force that lurked 
in the beef you eat for dinner. The butcher 
and the baker brought it to you, the farmer sent 
it. And before it was you, that meat was ox ; 
before it was ox, it w^as grass; before it was 
grass, it was mineral in the earth, and gas in 
the air, and. water. But what so marvellously 
wrought up the chemic force in gas and mineral 
to chemic force in me ? The sun's heat did it ! 
Nay, that chemic force, it is supposed, is itself 
the sun's ray, transformed from the power that 
darts through space to that which holds the 
atoms of the elements fast-locked together. 
Somewhat thus the men of science tell the story. 
The busy creeping of the clock's hands round 
their little circle is traced out of the clock, 
out of me who wind it up, out of the food that 
made me, out of the earth which produced the 
food, back, back, to the great time-measurer in 



48 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



the heavens. The sun winds up our watches! 
And whence got the sun its heat ? Perhaps by 
the constant condensation of its vast body, pos- 
siblv bv the striking of vast hordes of whirling 
meteors on its surface. Both theories may be 
doubted, and be supplanted by new theories; 
but, on any theory, we have now to follow 
our clock's creep beyond our sun to the vast 
interstellar spaces where the world-systems 
gather themselves together from nebula?, and 
myriads of suns charm their planets to attentive 
courses. 

Is it not very wonderful? Forever and for- 
ever, — there is no stopping in the vast journey, 
if we ask the wherefore of the simplest motion 
that our eyes perceive. Nothing wasted, noth- 
ing lost ; each particle accounted for ; each pulse 
of light or heat or electricity forever doing its 
appointed work in ceaseless resurrections ; at 
each birth exactly reproducing in new forms 
that which had ceased in old ones. 

And, if we could watch with eyes all-seeing, 
we should expect to watch those world-systems 
themselves coming and going like the leaves 
upon our trees, like the human generations, — 
systems evolving, and dissolving, and then 



RESURRECTION. 



49 



again evolving, in endless cycles of cosmic re- 
production. 

Such is the great Resurrection Psalm which 
modern scienee reverently sings. We find its 
noble verse in such chapters as Tyndall and 
Spencer write. To go back, then, to the fields 
and answer our question, What makes the 
spring-force? That which is true of the clock 
upon the mantel is but more magnificently 
true of our spring-time on the earth. The mo- 
tion of our May, vast as it is and beautiful, is 
but a little stir in the eternal Resurrection proc- 
ess by which the sun mothers all motion on 
the earth. A little more, a little less of sun- 
light, — that is all that makes the play of sea- 
sons. The earth, in its round, places itself so 
that the rays fall more vertically on its surface, 
and the deed is done! Only that and nothing 
more, and, lo ! the south winds blow ; the rivers 
run; the frozen ground turns into flowers; the 
trees break forth at every inch into leaf-life ; 
the pilgrim birds arrive, singing and mating; 
the children are shouting in the street ; the 
young men and maidens are marrying; the old 
people are thanking God that the rheumatism 
has left their bones ; the poor are easy and hope- 



50 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



ful again ; the armies are moving ; the wars be- 
gin again; and all the comedies and tragedies 
of plant and animal and human life are in full 
play once more. Sun's heat, — that is all that 
has done it ! And each transformation of the 
force, from the time it issues from the sun 
in lightning thrills to the time it quickens the 
pulsing of a sick child's blood, or stirs as nerve- 
force in the cells of the poet's brain, — what is 
it but a vanishing to reappear, a dying into a 
Resurrection ? 

Let us leave the world of fields and skies, and 
enter that of man. Here, if we speak our word 
and listen, it will echo for us from every part of 
human experience. 

We hear it grandly in the fate of nations. 
One blots out another by conquest, then that 
vanisher rises again by the slow absorption of its 
civilization. The old cultures of the race are 
thus secured and handed down in cycles of 
rhythmic history. Hebrew absorbs Canaanite>. 
and Persia absorbs Babylon, Egypt and Asia 
Minor and Persia yield to Greece, and Greece 
to Rome, and Rome to barbarous Goth and 
Frank; and throughout the process Man saves 



RESURRECTION. 



his own, and t lie forces, mental and moral, are 
guided to the finer issues of modern Europe 
and America. The brains that planned the 
pyramids, the bravery of the warriors at Troy, 
the enthusiasm of the Crusader, are hoarded in 
the broadened intellect and nobler ideals and 
fairer instincts of the children of to-day. 

We hear another echo, another series of 
echoes, repeated from every individual life. 
One death Ave die? Why, we die from one 
day to another. We only live by dying. The 
doctors say our very bodies are changed, atom 
hy atom, every few years; that you are not 
quite the same persons you were when you met 
here the last time. And do not all mothers 
know what it is to lose their children's fac s, 
not by a death-day, but by the swift birthday 
circling round ? 

In mind, in character, who doubts our fact ? 
A young man grasps, at last, the real purpose 
of his life, a girl leaves her school and enters 
on home duties; what is that but a dying of 
the boy and girl, a Resurrection to the man, the 
woman? Then, perhaps, they awake to the feel- 
ing that they are living lives of busy seliishm-s 
and uselessness and sin; and with deep heart- 



52 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



searching and repenting, with prayer and vow 
and earnest struggle, they consecrate themselves 
to something better. It is the fairest of all the 
Resurrections, — a dying of the poor self, a rising 
to the nobler self. Friends well name it the 
revival, the new birth. 

Half-way between their birthday and their 
death-day, this man and this woman stand side 
by side before the minister. They call it " wed- 
ding-day " : it is their Resurrection-day ! What 
dies? Two separate selves. Two separate 
homes, that now are breaking up. What comes 
to birth ? Two lives in one. A new home. A 
new family. A new starting-point for births 
and deaths, for joys and tragedies, for obedi- 
ence to laws of love and life, and nobler 
growth thereby, or for breaking of those laws 
and thereby growing ruin. Can they fully 
know, these two, the solemn act of Life-in-Death 
in which they join, so brimful with consequence? 
Xot they ! 

While they are finding out, the years pass on, 
and our man and woman are, once more, two, — ■ 
for one of them is here, one gone. And again 
there is a Resurrection to be watched. A voice 
is gone, yet, hark! its tones are "rising" in those 



RESURRECTION. 



53 



children's voices ringing ont at play. A Bmile 
is gone; yet tliere it lurks around the fresh 
young lips and eyes. The pose of the head, the 
motion of the body, the habits of the hands 
still linger in the home. The mother or the 
father is dead, but the mother's love or the 
father's honor has "risen" in the form of fam- 
ily-ideals to shape new lives of gentle deeds and 
manly ways. 

Is it ever otherwise? We read of Theodore 
Parker, that, as he lay on his death-bed in Flor- 
ence, in a wandering mood he grasped the hand 
of a friend, and said eagerly: " I have something 
to tell you: there are two Theodore Parkers 
now. One is dying here in Italy ; the other I 
have planted in America. He will live there 
and finish my work." Many a wanderer from 
the beaten creed-paths has found that "other" 
Parker sown through the wide land, and blessed 
the risen messenger that showed him God afresh. 
I think it is never otherwise. Truly, the chem 
ists of history cannot weigh and count and 
prove ; but, seeing what we do of the laws of 
Life-in-Death, we have a faitli to say that in the 
world of mind, as in that of matter, Nature 
gathers up the fragments so that nothing is 



54 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



lost, — no thought or feeling or ideal perish- 
ing utterly, any more than atoms or vibrations 
physical. 

But there is borne to us, thinking of such van- 
ished friends, one echo more, the most mys- 
terious of all. Let us listen to it quietly and 
reverently. 

Ah ! if we could interpret that word " Resur- 
rection " fully, and not in dim, far hints, we 
should fathom the depths of consciousness and 
unconsciousness. " Birth " and " Death " would 
be new words to us ; not events of beginning 
and ending, but instants in an eternal j>rocess 
of Becoming. If we could interpret that word 
fully, it would explain not only the mystery 
beyond, but that mystery which is past. We 
should find out the whence and the how of this 
body's Resurrection to its present form. Where 
was our body 

" In the beautiful repose 

That it had before its birth, 
With the ruby, with the rose, 

With the harvest, earth in earth " ? 

How came it that our dust was not the ruby, 
was not rose, was not part of some golden har- 



RESURRKCTIOX. 



55 



vest ? How came it that, when we rose, we roa * 
as baby-man and baby-woman, as Nellie, John 
and Willie ? 

" The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar/' 

O that we had some angel of the Resurrection 
to tell us what we were in the immortality that 
lies behind us ! And how we came from that 
to this; what death we died to reach this life; 
what forgotten pains we have passed through, 
and what joys; and how much of that old ex- 
perience we have brought with us ! Have we, 
buried in us, like the trees, rings of many sea- 
sons of rebirths and redeaths? And does our 
hope of immortality lie rooted in a memory? 
Is the seed's dream of the flower it will be a 
dim consciousness of blossom-tints that have 
enfolded it, and of free winds it once knew 
upon the tree-top? Have we come up, or come 
down, to this new life on earth; been souk* time 
more than w T e are now; and are we limping 
Lucifers fallen by some prenatal sin to human 
incarnation, or stand we now upon the topmost 
step of being we have ever touched ? Are we 
as wakers to our past, and is that the reason 



00 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



that it lies so vague and dim ? Are we as 
sleeping dreamers to our future, and is that the 
reason that it lies so dim? Are Ave always 
passing from a night into a morning, which is 
still but night to the brighter days that lie be- 
yond? It is question upon question, and no 
answer ! At least, the only angels that give 
answer are this same curious mind in us that 
asks the question, — this thirsting aspiration to 
be yet more, — this love that clings, — this sense 
of duty that seems as if it never could be born 
and never die, but always must have been to 
always be, — this inward voice of " Life ! Life ! " 
that haunts us so forever. Xo answer more 
than that. 

But, I think, it helps us, in doubts we have 
about our future life, to remember how almost 
completely the two mysteries are one, — that 
which shrouds the Resurrection which has been 
at birth to make us what we are, and that 
around the Resurrection that shall be. Solve 
the first, and you have solved the last. Nay, 
tell me what I am to-day, and you have proba- 
bly solved both. The deep secret is not the 
secret of the future, but the secret of becoming 
one thing from having been another. Deeper 



RESURRECTION". 



yet, the mystery of leing at all. But that "be- 
coming one thing from having been another," — 
it is the common mystery of growth. The 
processes which we cease to wonder at because 
they go on all the time under our eyes, by 
which a few pounds of soft and winking baby- 
hood become the Xapoleon or Daniel Webster 
who shape the nations; these processes by which 
we differ to-day from what we were when the 
last flowers were in the fields. — are part of that 
same miracle of growth, of becoming, of which 
birth and death, whatever they may be, are cer- 
tainly but other parts. We can trace the proc< ss, 
one little inch of it. But that is a wholly differ- 
ent thing from explaining even that inch. If 
I could but explain myself as I am, or the dif- 
ference between myself of to-day and myself 
of yesterday, I should doubtless have a stronger 
argument for my immortality than any that the 
thinkers yet have framed. 

Why do we, then, concentrate our wonder 
on one moment in the horizon of our time-view, 
and sorrowfully call that narrowed wonder 
"doubt about our immortality n ? Look be- 
hind, and explain the moment when you r«>se 
on the verge of the horizon in that direction. 



53 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



A daily, momently rising has made us the be- 
ings that now stand in our footprints. That 
instantly recurring Resurrection will go on till, 
again, what they call us will go below the strain- 
ing . vision of our friends. And what then ? 
Why comes then the doubt for the first time 
with a startling horror, " What if there be no 
resurrection of the dead ? " Nay : standing 
amid the greatness of this Resurrection thought, 
we begin to feel, in spite of all our ignorance, 
that there is no meaning in that word " dead ! " 
Jsothing in death can be stranger than every- 
thing in life. The "argument" for all we want 
in immortality is unattaining : it falls far short 
of the questions to which we long to haye an 
answer. But nearly eyery man who thinks 
amid his trust, and yet knows that he does 
trust and is happy amid his thinking, comes 
probably to two conyictions as his final state- 
ments, — - this for one : All of me there is, has 
ey^r been, and all will eyer be, each atom and 
each impulse of me, whateyer new form atom 
or impulse take. And this, too, one feels sure 
of with a mighty sureness, — that the facts about 
that unknown future form, whateyer they may 
be, lie within the Eternal Goodness, and are* 



RESURRECTION. 



59 



therefore, surely better than our besl hope about 
tlieuic My brightest hope is ignorance still. 
My trust in Goodness — to me that docs riot 
seem like ignorance. That trust, and the R is- 
urrection at my birth, so strange, so unrem< in- 
hered, hinting at so much life unknown behind, 
are, as it were, God's affidavit that I need not 
fear about the Resurrections to come. 

Thank God, then, friends, for the Resurrection 
thoughts which the spring months bring to us ! 
We die to live again. We die that tee may 
live again. Nothing is quickened save it die. 
Mortality is the condition of all immortality. 
What echoes we have wakened of this truth ! 
The opening spring prints it off on every* hillside 
in illuminated text of leaf and flower. The 
suns in the heaven are blazing it. The nations 
in their history repeat it. The sin-experience in 
which we first find God reveals it. The passing 
moment of each man's and woman's life is ring- 
ing gladly with it. Our dead friend's memory re- 
calls it. The mystery of each instant's life Hashe s 
it far backward through the past, far forward 
through the future. We find, as always with 
these central facts of Xature, that the best and 



60 



A YEAR OE MIRACLE. 



highest meaning of the truth belongs to our- 
selves, — so completely is Man a part of all, so 
completely is all represented in Man. Our word 
" Resurrection " seems to concentrate the history 
of the universe, to whisper the secret of the 
life of God ! 

And as we think of all these things, those 
words which I read you awhile ago fill and throb 
with their tides of meaning : — 

Praise ye the Lord, all things that die! Ye 
die that ye may live again. 

Praise ye him, sun and moon, that yet shall 
fade ! 

Praise him all ye stars of light, whose light 
shall yet be quenched ! 

Praise the Lord, O earth, so full of changing 
deaths! Praise him, fire and hail, snow and 
vapors, and stormy winds, each vanishing as ye 
fulfil his word ! 

Praise him, mountains and all hills, that yet 
shall melt! 

Praise him, beasts and all birds ! Praise him, 
young men and maidens, old men and children ! 
Let everything that hath the breath of life 
praise the Lord ; for all shall die, that all may 
live again ! 

Praise ye the Lord ! 



FLOWERS, 



III. 



FLOWERS. 

u Consider the lilies, how they grow," said 
Jesus ; " they toil not, they spin not, — ■ yet Solo- 
mon in all his glory was not arrayed like one 
of these." 

One summer day I happened into a flower ex- 
hibition. A placard gave notice that the subject 
of the day's discussion was to be " The Lily " ; 
and relying on the word of Jesus as a pass, I 
went in obediently to hear the garden-men " con- 
sider the lilies, how they grow." The Japan 
lily was the special subject of the talk: how 
could the stranger best be made to grow among 
ourselves ? One man told of his greenhouse 
luck, and another of his pot-luck, and the next 
one talked of soils, and so on, round the circle. 
And all the while the superb things stood upon 
their stalks and looked at us, no king in all his 
glory arrayed like one of them ! 

That word of Jesus is almost the only tender 



64 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



word about flowers in all the Bible. In the 
books of the Apocrypha and in the Song of Solo- 
mon, roses and lilies are mentioned twice or 
thrice in the lover's way ; but the Hebrew feel- 
ing for Nature was rather a feeling of its sub- 
limity than of its beauty. The sun and stars, 
the mountains and the desert and the sea, the 
rains, the lightning and the earthquake, these 
stand forth in the Old Testament imagery. And 
trees were loved, and fruit was praised. But 
grass and leaves are scarcely spoken of save as 
the emblem of withering, — "All flesh is grass," 
" We all do fade as a leaf." When the Hebrew 
thought of fragrance, he thought of myrrh and 
frankincense rather than of roses; and when he 
thought of beauty, a gem rather than a blossom 
was the wonder to his eye. Many a flash of 
ruby and sapphire and emerald gleams from the 
Bible pages. The wall of the Xew Jerusalem 
is built up of them, and its twelve gates are 
twelve pearls. In that city is a tree of life, and 
it has twelve fruits indeed, — but never a word 
of flowers in the heaven on earth that was to be. 
Paul was too earnest in his gospel of repentance, 
and too deep in the revelation of the mystery of 
the love of God in Christ to think of the love of 



FLOWERS. 



nr, 



God to the hillsides and the good news revealed 
in wild-flowers. So this little word of Jesus 
stands almost alone to make us know that there 
was, at least, one pair of eyes in Palestine that 
saw the Father everywhere. It is one of the 
verses that show that Jesus was no common 
man. 

Yet Jesus "considered" the outside beauty 
only, I suppose. Those garden-men I spoke of, 
who knew of the tireless toil by which the plant- 
€ells are built up from the soil, and the won- 
drous spinning of plant-fibres, and the secret 
weddings of the flowers, were considering mys- 
teries of growth of which he could not have 
dreamed. Who loved the lily best ? Those 
who know its wonder best can love it best, no 
doubt; and so, I trust, the garden-men. Yet 
that were only possible, if the other love, the 
Jesus-love, the poet's, the worshipper's love, were 
joined to their science. Xo worship like the 
worship of science when it does worship ! 

What would summer be without the flowers ! 
And yet a summer with flowers is a modern im- 
provement. For ages and ages, through far the 
greater part of its life thus far, a flowerless earth 



66 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



has turned its sombre face up to the sun. It 
had not learned to smile. Even the summers of 
the ages to which we owe our coal-beds had no 
flowers, no fruit-blossoms, no grass, and, of course, 
no bees and no song-birds in them ! All the 
plants, the wise men say, were like our ferns or 
club-mosses or meadow-horsetails, — only " there 
were giants in those days," — or else like our 
cone-bearing trees; all reproducing in the secret 
way the ferns still know, or the quiet way the 
pine-cones have. Xot till long ages afterwards 
did the Junes bear blossoms. 

Thinking of that, we can hardly say "the 
good old times ! " We thank Heaven that the 
birds and flowers came before us. Indeed, the 
earth had to be ripe for them before it could be 
ripe for us. So here we are to-day, and the 
whole land, all the summer through, laughs for 
us in grass and flowers, — that peal beginning in 
anemones and violets, rising into roses, and 
ending in the golden-rod and asters. Great 
tribes of beings have been already born, and 
others are on their way to being, to people 
the planet with color and beauty. 

What place on it shall have the fairest? 
Where will the Great Gardener walk and work 



flowers. fi7 

most fondly ? On the broad stretches of prai- 
rie-floor, paved with gay mosaic ? Or in the se- 
cret places of the' woods? Or on the tiny farms 
that hardly seem to dot the New England land- 
scape, although Massachusetts is the crowded 
corner of America? No, none of these, — for 
Dr. Hayes (was it?) says he never saw such 
"beautiful wild-flowers as in the Arctic zone, 
where the summer is almost counted by the 
hours! And Ruskin, with his mountain-love, 
claims the noblest for the uplands. The grass 
grows nowhere softer and greener than on the 
Alpine pastures, or in the glacier meadows of 
our own Sierras, meadows set nine thousand Eeet 
above sea-level; and right out of the Swiss 
glaciers, nestled by eternal snows, spring rocks 
whose bright tops are gardens of anemones and 
gentians. But the lovers of the ocean, mean- 
while, tell us that nowhere do the colors glow 
and deepen so, as where the sea-winds feed them. 
The reddest wild roses I ever saw grew ou1 
the graves of the old Puritan ministers of Mar- 
blehead, who lie, in a row among the rocks of 
the quiet, seaward burying-ground. Or what 
think you of the great central plain of Califor- 
nia in flower-time? For six months of the year 



68 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



it is a scorched and dust-swept desert. In April 
it becomes one flower-bed, nearly four hundred 
miles long and thirty wide, lying at the feet of 
the snow-mountains. A traveller writes of it : 
" Go where I would, east, west, north, south, I 
still plashed and rippled in flower-gems. More 
than a hundred flowers touched my feet at every 
step, closing above them as if I were wading in 
water." To count the riches, he gathered the 
harvest of one square yard of the plain, taken 
at random like a cupful of water from a lake ; 
and it gave more than seven thousand distinct 
flower-heads, besides one thousand stems of 
silky grasses, — these rising from an inch-deep 
velvet floor, containing, by estimate, a million of 
the tiny cups and hoods that we call mosses ! 

And what a marvel is each one of all the 
myriad millions in its individual make and stat- 
ure ! Think what the mathematics of the leaf- 
arrangement imply, — that every leaf on every 
budding tree in each whole spring is set in its 
place by law ! that not one has stumbled to 
its twig, or to its station on the twig, by any 
accident ! and that this same ordered stationing 
is traceable all through the close phalanx of the 
pine-cone's scales, and determines where the 



FLOWERS. 



69 



limbs shall start on every tree, and the very 
spot within the blossom where each stamen shall 
droop or nod ! 

These last words, linking leaves, limbs and 
blossoms, touch the deepest flower-secret that 
has thus far been discovered. The school-boys 
know it now, but the wisest men were jusl 
knowing enough a century ago to guess it. It 
is the secret that the botanists call " metamor- 
phosis," — the secret that each and every organ 
of the flower is but a transformed leaf; that 
bud-scale and bract and sepal and petal and 
stamen and pistil, back to the new bud-scale, in 
spite of all the difference of their forms and all 
their varied tints, are but successive leaf-trans- 
figurations. Economic Nature gets her new 
effects, not by selecting new themes, but by 
playing variations on the old themes ; when she 
would make a blossom on an apple-tree or on a 
pasture-weed, she only shortens and alters what 
would else have been a common leafy branch. 
How do we know this? By tracing the cons- 
ulship of each pair of neighbor organs through 
graded series of transitional forms; by watch- 
ing the conversion and the reconversion of tl lese 
organs into each other in domesticated double 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



flowers; by studying the cases of monstrosity 
that so often blab Nature's riddles and reveal 
the latent tendencies of beings : on such full 
evidence as this we know it. 

But, not content with such transfiguration, 
the Mother of all beauty takes up the separate 
organs, and tenderly carries out her variations 
on each one. She bears fixed laws in mind and 
never really forgets her arithmetic, — the rules 
of twos and threes and fours and fives ; but by 
multiplying parts, by dividing parts, by joining 
them at this place on their edges, then at that, 
by enlarging some and making others smaller, 
by their complete abortion sometimes, by mould- 
ing horns and cups, by unfurling wings, by hang- 
ing bells, by ravelling fringes out, by all sorts 
of dainty devices of sculpture, she makes the 
myriad distinct species of miracles that men 
stare at untiringly as the flowers of spring. It 
is rare luck, in some classic land, to turn up from 
the soil the fragment of a marble statue of old 
beauty. But Nature flings her carvings every- 
where, — each one complete and fresh and per- 
fect for its niche, and such a joy that, were it 
the lone one of its race, it would draw the peo- 
ple into pilgrimages for its worship. 



FLOWERS. 



71 



She paints them, too. If any one seem ugly 
as a whole, place a bit of it under the micro- 
scope, and see what firmaments of color, what 
mines of sparkling gems, you have burst into. 
Under the lens, a quarter-inch of rosy petal 
flushes and spreads like a sunset sky ! A mot- 
tled streak turns into a glorious sunrise! Yon 
can think of nothing else for fit comparison. 
And then, instead of voice, she gives them 
fragrance. They have no speech or language; 
but in this way their music "goes forth through 
all the earth and their words to the end of the 
world." Unless, indeed, Huxley's fancy be fact, 
and by ears fine enough (possibly only ins - 
fine) a voice, also, could be heard, — the music 
of running sap, sound such as streams have that 
run through secret channels. If so, what cho- 
ruses rise through all the fields that some one 
hears ! 

But what is all this lavish sculpture and paint- 
ing and fragrance for, — lavished on the waste, 
where no man is, as well as in the garden-bed; 
lavished on the blossom's inmost slopes and 
curves, where human eyes cannot detect it, as 
much as on the inch of outward surface? We 



72 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



used to account for it as sign of God's delight 
in beauty in itself. We used to say, 

" If eyes were made for seeing, 
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being." 

But to-day, again, brings forward a new and 
richer thought, that all this beauty and fragrance 
is but a path to use. We can plainly see that 
all the energy of the plant goes to secure repro- 
duction, that all the parts of the flower subserve 
the purpose of seed-making. Deep hidden with- 
in the flower's heart lies the little nursery where 
the seeds are to be born ; most cunningly the 
pistil and the stamen watch each other like true 
lovers for a greeting ; tenderly the petals close 
around them in the cool, and open through fit 
hours of sunlight. And when the stamens and 
the pistil cannot meet directly, but the message 
must be borne by insect rovers, then the compli- 
cation of contrivance to secure the transport of 
the message almost exceeds belief. The pollen 
must be brought from a certain spot in one 
flower and left on a certain spot within an- 
other. Says one, speaking of Darwin's investi- 
gation of the orchids : " 4 Moth-traps and spring- 
guns set on these grounds' might well be the 
motto of these flowers. There are channels 



FLOWERS. 



7:5 



of approach along which the nectar-loving in- 
sects arc surely guided, so as to compel them to 
pass the given spots; there are adhesive plasters 
nicely adjusted to fit their probosces or 1«> c:i;<-ii 
their brows, and so unload their pollen-burden; 
sometimes, where they enter for the honey, 
there are hair-triggers carefully set in their 
necessary path, communicating with explosive 
shells that project the pollen-stalks with unerr- 
ing aim upon their bodies." And now Darwin 
adds to his explanations the thought (it is not 
yet wholly proved, but it is well advanced in 
proof) that the lustrous colors of the flowers and 
their rich odors are also contrivances to aid in 
the reproduction. He has found it " an invari- 
able rule that flowers fertilized by the wind 
never have the gayly-colored petals," and draws 
the inference that the beauty and the fragrance 
come upon the blossoms by long processes of 
natural selection, because attractive to the in- 
sects that are needed to assist in fertilizing them. 
The colors and the songs of birds and insects, 
he thinks, are in part similarly brought about. 
And thus all that gives the life and motion and 
peculiar gladness to the fields in summer would 
be literally but the deep inbreathing of the 



74 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 

spirit of Love in Nature. How far down it 
goes, to touch the whole planet to grace and 
beauty ! The thought lifts the rims of our 
yision and gives to Love a glory of meaning 
that we never guessed before. It seems to make 
real our feeling that a Father's heart is beating 
in all things. 

And in this distinction of sex the plants lay 
hold of us. They come between the mineral 
and animal kingdoms as the connecting link. 
For plants not only exercise the primitive diges- 
tion, — feeding on minerals, which they organize 
into the food on which we higher creatures live ; 
they not only hint, while they prepare, our re- 
spiration, — draining clear the air of that which 
poisons us, and restocking it with that which 
We must breathe ; but, in this distinction of sex 
in their flowers, they rise to the height of their 
stature and foreshadow the third great function 
of animal life, that of reproduction. Of the 
whole plant, the flower is the part nearest akin 
to us. Like us, it breathes oxygen and gives 
out carbonic acid. Like us, it therefore gives 
out heat, — the flower is the hottest part of 
the plant. Like us, it has rest — seasons, — 
sleep, so called ; and for reproduction needs to 



FLOWERS. 



hoard, and, in the process, exhausts vitality. 
And, like animals, plants have ancestry and 
consulship, and can only be arranged in a true 
system when Ave arrange them physiologically. 

"Consider the lilies," said Jesus. When we 
"consider" them and find such thoughts as 
these awaiting us, the words of another poet 
seem to rhyme across the centuries to his : — 

u Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, — 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower ; but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is ! " 

But I must leave the flowers themselves to 
speak a word about man's love of flowers. The 
love declares itself in many ways. 

The Arabs, passing a rich harvest-field or a 
tree in full bloom, will greet it with a " Barak 
Allah!" "May God bless you!" That hints 
the world-wide feeling:. And the Arab beggars 
name their children Ruby, Diamond, Lily, Ros . 
and Jessamine. So still do we. Gems and 
flowers, — each the highest product of its king- 
dom, for a gem is the exquisiteness of flint or 
clay, and flower the transfiguration of the plant, 



76 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



— instinctively we take them to name all other 
tilings precious and beautiful. 

TTe place the pots, like traps to catch the 
sunbeams, at our windows^ and like to set crea- 
tion going in our parlors. TTe make believe at 
£; woods" in little ferneries. TTe concentrate 
the fields in our gardens, and the climates in 
our green-houses. In southern France there are 
flower-farms. The Flower Mission to the hos- 
pitals and 2^risons is the daintiest form of mod- 
ern loving-kindness. The Horticultural Society 
in Boston holds a Saturday morning worship 
all through the summer, and it is better than 
cathedral-joy to linger at its altars. In Eng- 
land, the rich people have established Flower 
Exhibitions for workingmen. The little gardens 
that furnish the display are window-ledges in 
the back streets of London, or a box upon the 
roof-top, or little plots, six feet by ten, before 
the door. A bov will bring his solitary gera- 
nium, a girl her carnation, the father has his 
one or two rare roses (perhaps the money that 
bought them was saved from the ale-house), 
whose every leaf-bud has made breakfast-talk 
and after-supper watchings for the family. 
Each competing pot must have its seal and 



FLOW KUS. 



77 



knot of ribbon. And, when the day arri 
the lords and ladies come and look :md praise, 
and then the sixpenny admission Ids in the 
eager, well-dressed crowd, — and all gel prizes, 
I believe; and the factory-hands go home de- 
ciding what flower they will train to enter at 
the next annual show. The factory-hand's life 
holds room for that ! 

Love has made many lovers foolish ; but it 
took flower-love to drive a nation crazy. And 
of all nations it was the sober-headed Dutch- 
men ! Once in Holland they grew ecstatic over 
tulips; so crazily fond of tulips that two thou- 
sand dollars was cheap for a certain bulb. All 
ranks, high and low, were carried off their un- 
derstandings into tulip-speculations; the towns 
had their tulip-exchange ; the public notary b - 
came the tulip-notary. And when the bubble 
burst, fortunes vanished, the panic was national, 
and the country did not get over the shock to 
its commerce for several years. 

In other ways than this of cultivation, the 
ancient love has shown itself. Art has fed itself 
on flowers. Architecture tells the story earl; is . 
The heavy Egyptian column imitates, it is sup- 
posed, the palm-tree's trunk, and its capital the 



78 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



lotus-bud of the Nile. The Corinthian capital 
is the acanthus-leaf. The stones of Gothic ar- 
chitecture conspire in a hundred forms to imi- 
tate the vegetable structure. 

Poetry is full of flower-fields, because each 
flower seems full of poetry to us. The flower- 
names are often little poems in themselves. Those 
long, uncouth names, dreaded in botany, hide 
Nature-meanings in them. Heliotrope is " she 
who turns to the sun*'; mesembryanthemum is 
" flower of the mid-day " ; nasturtium carries its 
meaning of " bent-nose" in its face; geranium 
is "crane's-bill," — -let the seed-vessel grow and 
it will tell the reason why ; saxifrage is " rock- 
cleaver," named so from its birthplace in the 
clefts ; anemone is " wind-flower." These, you 
see, were but simple heart and eye names to 
the Greeks or Romans, just as we call the pets 
heart's-ease, day's -eye, morning-glory, honey- 
suckle, mignonette. Each people has its own. 
Other flower-names come down to us impearled 
with myth and story, — -the hyacinth, narcissus, 
Solomon's - seal, arethusa, the passion - flower. 
"What sacred romances the lotus-flower, the mar- 
tyr's palm, the victor's laurel, recall! There 
is probably no famous poet that has not sealed 



FLOWERS. 



79 



his fame into a song about some favorite of the 
fields. Wordsworth's celandines and daffodils 
are noted, and Burns's daisy, and Herbert's rose, 
and Emerson's rhodora, and Lowell's dandelion ; 
while in Chaucer the whole spring hud- and 
sings, and all along the lines of Tennyson flow- 
ers brush you with fine touches. 

Nay, every one plays poet with them, al- 
though he write no verses. We use them to 
interpret all the tenderest things in life. When 
the lovers want to tell the unutterable words, 
they betake themselves to the dumb messem^ r< 
who have learned to say so much. When we 
want to remember a hill-top view, a meeting 
that has made a holiday, some spot holy with 
old history, we pluck a flower to hold the mem- 
ory fast. When we want to send the home- 
presence tangibly in a letter, a flower from the 
window or the field close by will carry it best. 
Old books drop out the faded blossoms, put 
there "to mark great places with due uTati- 
tude." The California miner caught sight of 
the mountain heart's-ease just where his up- 
lifted pick was going to fall, and, ere it fell, 
he was at home across the continent, and in 
his own pasture where, a barefoot boy, ho 



so 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



drove the cows a thousand times. Hollyhocks 
and lilacs, — who thinks of them, and does not 
see a quiet country dooryard in the sunshine ? 
The sick soldiers in army hospitals, longing for 
certain faces, tones and touches, greeted the 
flowers as the best substitute. " Now, I've got 
something for you ! " said a woman-nurse, hold- 
ing the bunch behind her, to a very sick New 
England soldier, "something for you, just like 
what grows in your front dooryard at home. 
Guess!" "Lalocs!" he whispered ; and she 
laid them on his folded hands. " 0 lalocs ! 
how did you know that ? " The lilacs outlived 
him. 

Flowers and Art; flowers and Poetry; we 
must add, — the flowers and Science. For in 
the flowers a name is written, and to-day that 
name is found to have been written from the be- 
ginning in all things that are. All things grow. 
The flower is type of the universe, and the lily 
of the field is solving afresh for us the problems 
of creation : — 

We linger at the vigil 

With him who bent the knee 
To watch the old-time lilies 

In distant Galilee ; 



FLOWERS. 



81 



And still the worship deepens 

And quickens into new, 
As, brightening down the ages, 

God's secret thrilleth through : 
The flower-horizons open ! 

The blossom vaster shows ! 
"We hear the wide worlds echo, — 

" See how the lily grows ! " 

Nature shows us the world-systems "grow- 
ing," — growing from the nebula through aeons 
of gaseous and fluid toward the solid state; 
shows our earth " growing " from its naked 
chaos up to the beauty of man's present dwell- 
ing-place ; shows life on the earth " growing " 
through uncouth forms and dim sensations up 
to the beauty of man's stature and the miracle 
of human brain. ~Not " creation " anywhere, 
but evolution; not manufacture, but growth; 
not inbreaking miracles, but steadfast forces 
of transfiguration moving all things on by law 
not a God decreeing from without, but the Liv- 
ing Power within each and all things, "working 
hitherto." 

History shows us thought and morals - -Tow- 
ing" from beast-likeness up to all we hail as 
most divine, most "personal." Xo "pause in 
history" at such eras as the origin of Chris- 



62 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



itanity, — no halt and then an " origin," at all, — 
no sudden grace of "revelation" injected then 
into human borders ; but Man upon those 
Mediterranean shores slowly ripening amid the 
change of empires and religions, until the recog- 
nition of God's fatherhood and men's brother- 
hood and the god-likeness of self-sacrifice for 
others, came as natural blossoms on the stem 
of time. 

And consciousness reveals the flower-law in 
the processes of personal salvation. The sin- 
ner " growls " toward the saint, as he tries and 
fails and tries again from day to day; heaven 
is a gradual winning, not a surprise of giving; 
the kingdom of heaven comes not to the earth, 
but comes on the earth by "growing" there; 
and the prayer " Thy will be done ! " can blos- 
som to an answer only as each one " grows " to 
do the will : — 

Shy yearnings of the savage, 

Unfolding, thought by thought, 
To holy lives are lifted, 

To visions fair are wrought ; 
The races rise and cluster, 

And evils fade and fall, 
Till chaos blooms to beauty, 

God's purpose crowning all ! 



FLOWERS. 



And so the flower-love, mounting through art, 
poetry, science, shows itself in man's worship 
also. Thought seldom rises more naturally up 
to God than when it rises from bending over 
flowers. In Buddhist lands, they long have 
been the choicest offering that man brings 
the altar. As Ave keep the Christ's birthday 
with evergreens, the east keeps the Buddha's 
with blossoms; and when his tomb was opened 
two hundred years after his burial, the funeral 
flowers were found more fragrant and more 
exquisite than ever, we are told. There are 
holy blossoms there that symbolize the sun, 
the world, the throne of God, — ftower-symbols 
as sacred to millions as is the cross to Chris- 
tians. We bring the flowers into our churches: 
like music visible, they fill the pauses in the 8 r- 
vice ; and who comes here witli purer face or 
life of sweeter obedience to the laws of Nature? 

So sweet, so pure, they are, that, like our 
holiest friends, they fit not joy and wedding 
moments only, but still more naturally they 
come in amid the tragedies, the silences, the 
heart-breaks. Is not this the reason why? — ■ 

"When heaven grows dim, and faith seeks to renew 
The image of its everlasting dower, 
I know no argument so sweet as through 
The bosom of a llower.— 



84 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



"A wicket-gate to heaven (of which Death 
Is the grand portal, sealed to mortal eyes), 
Between whose little bars there comes the breath 
Of airs from Paradise." 

When the " grand portal " has opened and 
shut close to us, and we are left with straining 
gaze outside, the " wicket-gate " seems to give 
comfort. It seems to grant some little vision 
into the hidden heart of thing's, suo-o-estinsc that 
the darkness everywhere holds possibilities bet- 
ter even than our hopes. Save for the flower- 
fact, who could have dreamed that such beauty 
lurked in the dark earth, was latent in the tiny 
seed? So Ave place the flowers around the stilly 
cold face; we lay them on our soldiers' graves; 
we bring them to the sick-room and the bedside 
of the dying ; and everywhere, after words fail 
and even music hushes, their presence is a voice- 
less, unconfuted argument that the Power within 
all silences and pains and tragedies is Love, and 
that the possibilities of life are infinite. 



THE HARVEST-SECRET, 



IV. 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 

What is a Harvest-Season? 

It is Death — but a Fruition. It is stripped 
trees, but barrelled apples; stubble m the field, 
but wheat at the mill; out-of-doors, a naked 
world, the summer-things all gone, empty aests 
clinging to the boughs, brown leaves swinging 
their last hour in the wind or rustling crisply 
under foot ; and, indoors, thanksgiving season 
for the populations saved again, and for glad 
homes nestling closer. 

' The dying of our leaves was predetermined 
long ago, as ail deaths are, in the very constitu- 
tion of their frames. The earthy minerals that 
mingle in the sap and climb the tree, unable 
to evaporate, have to halt up in the tree-top; 
and there they pack the leaf-cells, until tl use 
lose their jioAver to vitalize the sap. But, by the 
time this happens, it is October and the fruil is 
made ; and the leaves, their first use over, are 



ss 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



nearly ready for a second, — to play the part of 
little carriers, and bear their pack of minerals 
back into the ground. Almost as soon as they 
appeared in spring, this moment was foreseen 
and jDreparation made for it. Where the leaf- 
stalk joins the twig, a ring of thick cells began 
to grow across from outside inwards and bar 
the entrance of the sap, — sealing beforehand 
what would else have been a wound upon the 
twig, and at last leaving the leaf so loosely held 
that the pat of any wandering breeze will push 
it off. Presently, but not until the fruition- 
deed is done, the fateful breeze arrives ; and the 
leaves, faithful unto death to the Lord of the 
Harvest, go where good leaves go, — 

" Where the rain may rain upon them, 
Where the sun may shine upon them, 
Where the wind may sigh upon them, 
And the snow may die upon them," — 

there, even in death, to minister to the beauty of 
new leaves that are to be. And as they cease 
from their higher use, Beauty, the reward of 
Use comes over them : their colors turn the hill- 
sides around New England villages into Avails 
like the New Jerusalem's, — that city of clear 
gold, whose wall was garnished with all precious 
stones. 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



89 



Fruition and a Death. That does not mean 
success becoming failure, then. The dying is 
part of the success. The loyal leaves ! they 
would resent a funeral sermon preached or 
dirges sung above them. Their very last word, 
their death-murmur, is " Life ! " " We have 
not been destroyed," they say : " we have been 
fulfilled in fruit that we have made : in it we 
have eternal life." 

They tell the truth. It is their fruit. It is 
the leaves that have made the fruit ; and fruit, 
the culmination of the plant, is the germ of 
their continued life. 

For " fruit " is but ripened seed, or the seed- 
vessels with the parts immediately connected. 
We call it wheat or barley or chestnut, if the 
sheath be hard ; grapes, blueberries, orange, 
melon, if the sheath be soft and fleshy. If the 
outside of the sheath be soft while the inner 
side is stony, then it is the cherry or the peach. 
If the coat is a stringy membrane, we have 
bean-pods. If the calyx, instead of dropping 
off, hugs the seed-case, and swells out to thick, 
sweet flesh around it, then we say that our 
apples and pears and quinces are getting ripe* 
Or, if a number of the seeds cluster close to- 



90 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



getter around a pulpy base, they make our straw- 
berries and blackberries. But always, whatever 
form or name it takes, fruit is ripened seed; 
and the whole summer's labor of the leaves has 
been to make that seed. 

How have they done it ? It is the secret 
called " Organization." We touched on it be- 
fore in speaking of the Resurrections. 

If our apples had a tongue between their 
red cheeks, they would tell us that once they 
were a part of the atmosphere and the ocean ; 
that they were made of salt sea-vapors and the 
long spring-rains and the melting snow-crystals, 
— of these, with the carbonic acid and ammo- 
nia, which the rain in falling through the air dis- 
solved, and a trifle of the soluble minerals lurk- 
ing in the earth where the orchard's rootlets 
crept. That they were, — and now they are our 
Baldwins in the cellar, red-cheeked indeed, but 
not because they blush to own that lowly origin. 
In the process of transmutation from what they 
were to what they are, it is the leaves that have 
been the chief agent. They have acted like air- 
fed mouths for the tree ; like skin, to evaporate 
its water; perhaps as heart, to help pump up 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



91 



the sap from clown below ; but their grand func- 
tion has been to act as the tree's stomach and 
assimilate its food. When the sap from Mother 
Earth reaches the tree-top, although slightly 
changed on the way up through the tree-ducts, 
it is still little else than crude sap, still in es- 
sence mineral ; it is not vital ; it can make no 
plant-cells yet. But let this liquid mineral only 
reach the leaf and have the sunlight fall upon 
it there, and the wonder happens, — Nature's 
j)erpetual miracle of Cana, by which the crude 
rain-water is " organized " into a subtiler fluid I 
Somehow, the light-waves do it. The story 
that the men of science tell of it, their most 
cunning guess (it is but guess), sounds like a 
tale of the Arabian lights. Here it is, made 
brief : — 

The ocean-waves, breaking against the shores 
of continents, gradually waste those shores away 
and spread them out into sea-beds, that by and 
by emerge and make the plains of continents to 
be. What the ocean-waves, on the grand scale, 
take the centuries to do, the unseen heat and 
light-waves flashing through the ether, — forty, 
fifty, sixty thousand of them playing in an inch I 
— five, six, seven hundred billions of them ar« 



92 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



riving in a second ! — these heat and light waves 
are supposed to do at every instant to the mole- 
cules of the substances on which they strike. 
The mimic tides pull down the structure of the 
molecules, mingle their atoms together, and 
build them over on a different plan. The un- 
pilings and repilings go on in perfect harmony, 
each element seeking its new mates by fixed 
laws of attraction, and mingling with them only 
in definite proportions, — as if the old Greek 
myth were fact, and some unseen Orpheus sat 
by in Nature like him who charmed the rocks by 
music into walls. And the more intricate the 
"pile," the more complex the molecule's plan, 
so much the more " vital " grows the substance. 

This, then, is what happens in the leaf. At the 
touch of the sun-tides, the earthy sap within it 
deconrposes and rearranges its constituent atoms 
of oxygen and hydrogen, of nitrogen and carbon 
and the rest, — rearranges all in forms more in- 
tricate. Thereby, the mineral turns to plant, 
the " inorganic " to " organic," the unborn be- 
comes alive ! And the holy ground where this 
drama of perpetual Creation goes on through 
all the springs and summers everywhere is — - 
the Green Leaf. So far as the plant is con- 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



93 



cerned, to that belongs the credit of the great 
transfiguration. 

The sap, thus vitalized, then descends the 
tree. According to the chemistry of separate 
locations, it becomes a hundred different things. 
Where only three of its four chief elements co- 
operate, it builds the cell and fibre-walls, — our 
timber; and makes the sugar and starch and 
gums and oils to which we owe that part of our 
food which supports breath and keeps the body 
warm. But where the fourth element, the nitro- 
gen, is added in, the sap becomes a live sub- 
stance, "protoplasm," that bathes and lines the 
cells and coats their nucleus, that enters into the 
green of leaf and bark, that gathers still more 
richly in the blossom, and that most of all con- 
centrates in the seed, stocking it with that other 
part of food, which builds up our flesh and 
frame. Most of all concentrates in the seed, I 
say : seed is the most vital substance, the very 
highest being in all the structure of the j)lant. 
Its atoms are the outcome of the tree's whole 
past, the germ of all its future. It is all the 
old and all the new, in one. For this the root- 
lets sucked, the sap ran, the twigs budded, the 
leaves uncurled and veined and spread and filled 



94 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



the tree, and breathed the sunshine in, and 
stood up to greet the showers, and held on 
through the tug of storms; and for this the 
flowers, — which, as we have seen, are but the 
"first families" of leafdom, — for this the flow- 
ers arrayed themselves and celebrated the little 
weddings, and then chambered their very hearts, 
— all for this end, that, at last, the seed-children 
might grow and cluster there. All was for 
them, and they are the "fruit." In every tree 
and violet and grass, in every lichen on its rock, 
in every cloudlike pulp that stains the ditches 
green, in every weed that swings at anchor in 
the seas, this seed-making (or some process kin 
to it) has been carried on through all the days 
and nights since earliest spring. No man 
through all the populations could make one. 
Earth and Sun, it takes them both, — it takes a 
solar system, all alive, to make a seed ! 

It is October, and again the deed is done ! 
The ripened seed-vessels hold the hope of the 
world. New root, new stem, new leaf, new 
bud, and all the possibilities that sleep in them, 
are there wrapped up together. In these, the 
next spring's resurrection, next summer's glory, 
next autumn's gold and red, lie already in em- 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



03 



bryo. And everything is safe. Fear not, O 
lands ! Be not afraid, O fields ! Let the leaves 
die, and. the cold come out of the north ! 

YThat sanctity, what wonder past "wonder, 
hallows the tiny thing so wrought and put to- 
gether ! As we hold a grain of corn or wheat 
in our hand, and look at it, and think how it 
sums irp the year, — 

" Then, suddenly, the awe grows deep, 
Until a folding sense, like prayer, 
Which is, as God is, everywhere, 
Gathers about us ; and a voice 
Speaks to us without any noise, 
Being of the silence/' 

and, lo! we are at worship, — listening bowed 
before a seed ! 

And should we trace yet farther that little 
handful of the year's great harvest which we 
shut up in barns and loaves and call " our " 
harvest, — and which is as incidental to the trees 
and grasses as the birds' nests are that hide in 
them, — it would be simply tracing higher this 
same process of " organization" 

On Thanksgiving Day, as we draw our chairs 
around the table, if we stop a moment and 
think over the familiar story so wonderful and 



D6 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



praiseful, — think what miracles have been en- 
acted to spread the table for us, how last spring 
the dinner lay in minerals and was blowing in 
the air, and how rains and storms and rise and 
set of snns and summer-noons and starry nights 
have wrought, till, lo ! the squash for our Thanks- 
giving j}ies ; the cranberries for our sauce, — that 
will seem miracle enough ! But our turkey, if 
we have one, is a greater marvel yet. You know 
what the western farmer does, when it costs too 
much to transport his corn in bulk ? He feeds 
it to his swine, and^ then the crops come on four 
legs across the prairies. He is but imitating the 
Lord of the Harvest. We cannot go to the grass 
and eat it — a herd of isTebuchadnezzars. But 
the grass comes to us ! God — to give that 
Power by which we live a name — God gathers 
up the sweetness of a whole hill-side pasture, 
of a meadow with all its clovers, of a sea with all 
its swaying weeds, and, in the quiet grazers 
that go to and from our barn, or the creatures 
that cackle out their little lives around it, or 
the shy rovers of the woods and waters, offers 
us the sweetness economically packed, that is, 
more higlihj organized, built up now into flesh- 
atoms, — atoms more complex, more vitalized, 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



97 



than any that the vegetable world contains. It 
is bnt the process of plant-making carried a step 
farther. Another transfiguration has occurred. 
To become grass is Heaven to minerals. To be- 
come ox is Heaven to the grass. To become 
man is a kind of unwelcome Heaven to oxen ! 

For, after dinner, the process of transfigura- 
tion will continue. The atoms, once inside of 
us, will rearrange and organize themselves in 
structures more and more wonderful, till in 
man's brain, the most complex of animal struct- 
ures, we literally have, as one has said, "the con- 
densation of all Space, the grand evolved result 
of all Time." Listen to what Dr. Clarke says 
of our human brain : — 

" That marvellous and delicate engine, which 
is only a few inches in diameter, whose weight 
on an average is only about forty-nine ounces, 
contains cells and fibres counted by hundreds of 
millions ; cells and fibres that vary in thickness 
from one one-millionth to one three-hundredth 
of an inch : it is an engine, every square inch 
of whose gray matter affords substrata for the 
evolution of at least eight thousand registered 
and separate ideas ; with substrata in the whole 
brain for evolving and registering tens of mil- 



PS 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



lions of them, besides the power of recalling 
them under appropriate stimulus ; an engine 
that transmits sensation, emotion, thought, and 
volition, by distinct fibres, whose time-working 
has been measured to fractions of a second; it 
is an engine, a mechanism, that can accomplish 
this, and greater wonders still, without conscious 
friction, pain, or disturbance, if it be only prop- 
erly built and its working be not interfered 
with/' 

From air and rain and rock to human brain, 
the series mounts ! And, as it is the stored-up 
forces of the skies that work the transformation, 
Science declares us, in a sense more real than 
ever the grand myth fabled, Children of the Sun. 

This is " Organization," — the Secret of the 
Harvest. 

It is the secret of all God's harvest-fields; the 
way in which he hoards the gains of all his work 
from waste. It is the miracle within the mira- 
cle of Snow and Resurrection and the Flowers. 

To much more in ourselves than the structure 
of the body it is a clue. Thanks to the Harvest- 
Secret, we need not mourn for anything as lost, 
— perhaps need mourn for nothing as even 
wholly vanished. 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



99 



For instance, our forgotten knowledge. "I 
have forgotten more than you ever knew.*' is the 
poor unction some of us have to quietly lay to 
our souls to keep up self-respect, when we meet 
the bright young people all equipped with facts 
and items. But how is knowledge reckoned 
best, — in so many school-years, so many books 
read, so many facts hived up in memory? It is 
good to have facts hived away: theories are 
worth nothing, unless based on them, and, as a 
good deal of a man's talk is theorizing, it is help- 
ful to have at hand large quarries of the corner- 
stones. It is good to remember the books we 
read, and the faces we have met, and what names 
go with the faces, and to be able to quote the 
formulas we learned when young, and to keep 
the French and German nimble on the tongue. 
But this is only knowledge, after all, not wis- 
dom, — which is knowledge become one's self ; it 
is only learning, not education, — which is learn- 
ing transformed to faculty. It is only the 
means by which, and not the end for which. 
It is only leaves, not fruit. 

I am not decrying culture"; but the college- 
gift is much misvalued. Many a man gets great 
good from college who at his graduation could 



100 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



hardly enter over again for lack of the statistics 
and dates and prosody that helped to pass him 
in; and to whom, in a few years ; the Greek and 
trigonometry become more Greek and unknown 
quantities than ever, — great good he gets, be- 
cause, though dropping these, he has meanwhile 
learned by their aid how to handle his mind. 
u He knows what he knows, he knows that he 
doesn't know much, he knows how to get what he 
doesn't know, and needs." He has learned that 
snap-judgments are worthless ; that nothing is 
learned until both sides are learned ; and he has 
gained a certain tactile sense by which shams 
in culture and attainment are detected at quick 
sight. And this is no bad harvest for the four 
years spent at college. But, then, just because 
this is really so large a part of the four years' 
harvest, many a man who never goes to college 
gets the essence of the college-education. The 
very best result of culture is still a finer com/non- 
sense. " Common-sense,*' — the knack of using 
swiftly, surely, and in conjunction, the common 
human powers. He who gets that knack may 
boast with Richter that he has " made the most 
he could out of the stuff." And what is this 
common-sense but the concentrated result of a 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



101 



thousand thousand judgments, memories, reflec- 
tions, the " organized " product and final out- 
come of all our thinking processes? Such or- 
ganized and final outcome, as we have seen, is 
" fruit." In this fruit, a finer common-sense, the 
books and lessons and days and persons we meet 
must be harvested, or they are as good as lost, — ■ 
"nothing but leaves.'' If so harvested, they 
have been saved, although in themselves the 
books, days, persons, fade from memory and drop 
like leaves entirely off our tree of life. 

I said that those who count as the unbred not 
seldom pass by the highly bred, because life's 
practical school has proved better than a college 
to train these common powers. The scholar, for 
instance, ought to be the one best furnished to 
see most in Europe, — that great mass of history 
crystallized in cities and cathedrals and old art 
and customs. And no doubt the scholar usually 
does see most. But have you never found your 
neighbor, the merchant, who began life as a 
shop-boy, and ever since has lived among his 
boxes and ledgers, and has made his money, 
and at sixty sets out with his wife and his five 
children to go the rounds of Europe, with an 
English Murray in every pair of hands, — have 



102 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



you never found him coming home with a sur- 
prising amount of Europe " organized" in him? 
He leans back in his chair before the fireplace 
and tells you he has been to seventy-two cities, 
and has a picture of each one in his mind, and 
he knows how many stairs there are in the 
cathedral-towers, and how high and long St. 
Peters is, and where the pictures hang in the 
galleries : he has " done " Europe. But none 
the less it is in him now, — culture and joy for 
the rest of life. And how has he been able to 
see and bring home so much ? Because, while 
working over those boxes and ledgers and cor- 
respondence through the years of business-life, 
he has harvested the habit of wide-awakeness, 
the quickness to see minutely, the power to 
seize firmly and recall vividly details ; and he 
carried abroad with him these sheaves of fac- 
ulty all barned up in his brain. He hardly 
knows he has them ; at least, he had never sus- 
pected they would give him so much of Euroj^e. 
He is surprised at his friends' surprise that he 
has seen so much: " Who couldn't? It's there 
to see," he says. But, none the less, he is con- 
scious of a new feeling of fellowship with those 
whom he had always before revered afar off as 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



103 



the happy possessors of that mystic " culture." 
The old ledgers are mouldering on the back 
shelf in the cellar, the boxes have long since 
turned to kindling-wood, while the shoes or can- 
dles or drugs they held have gone to their own 
place : all have dropped out of the merchant's 
life like leaves from the tree, but they have left 
the " fruit " of ripened faculty behind them, — 
" seed " which has flowered in this late summer 
of pleasant knowledge for him. 

But our Harvest-Secret is as true of other 
parts of life's experience. The trials, the dis- 
appointments, the sorrows that make the anni- 
versaries sad, the wane of friendships, the temp- 
tations that were hardly put under foot, are 
leaves which the seasons bring and the seasons 
take away, To no purpose ? Nay, they give us 
the new preciousness of ourselves, our strength 
of spiritual fibre, our wiser philosophy of life, 
the beautiful lines on the face, the quiet cheer 
in the heart, and our increasing helpfulness. 

Do vou know no woman who has thus been 
ripened? Greet her, — she has had small chance 
outside of the housekeeping, but you find her 
answering you with bright, live, first-brain 
thoughts. She can offer you her experience 



104 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



against your schooling, and is very apt to give 
you more than she gets from you. There is so 
much of her, because all she has learned by life 
is not in her merely, but is herself. It is a stay- 
at-home wife, or a plain-faced, humble-minded 
sister ; one who thinks herself a mere " chink- 
filler." Not for her the out-door exhilaration, 
the pleasant changes which the husband or 
brother has. But possibly the stamina of the 
home lie in her, and not in him. She is, per- 
haps, the real bulwark, the comfort, the pleasant 
crispness of the household life, — and he the limp- 
ness of it, although he earn the money. Those 
tame home-hours, the lonely drudgeries, that 
long patience with the children, the evenings 
over their stockings, with the shut book waiting 
on the table — while he smokes ; the mornings 
over their lessons — while he reads the paper; 
the quiet going around for whims — his, proba- 
ably; the word held back on the tongue; — all 
this has been slowly vested in strength and self- 
control and the sweet shrewdness. She is con- 
tinually pulling down her spirit-barns and build- 
ing bigger to hold the riches of her harvest. 
She is gray-haired before she finds out that 
the harvest is a large one. Many generations of 
stockings have passed through the basket, the 



THE HARVEST-SECRET. 



105 



boys who missed the spelling so are grown up, 
and almost all those little doings and bearings 
are forgotten : those leaves have dropped from 
year to year, but the seed which they have 
made, — her friends are praising that when they 
say, " How good she is, how pleasant, and how 
we lean on her ! " The citizens are jDralsing 
that when they elect her boys to the legislature. 

My merchant and his wife are only typical* 
It is you and I, it is man and woman. In us all, 
and all through life, the Secret of the Harvest 
is the same. The laws of the seasons reign in 
us. " Herein is the Father glorified, that we 
bear much fruit." The course of life is a thou- 
sand trifles, then some crisis, — and again a 
thousand trifles and a crisis : nothing but green 
leaves under common sun and shadow, and then 
a storm or a rare June day. And far more 
than the storm or the perfect day the common 
sun and common shadow do to make the autumn 
rich. It is the " every days " that count. TJiei/ 
must be made to tell, or the years have failed. 
To tell: for that, thought and feeling must be- 
come action, and action habit, and habit turn to 
principles and character. And if for some of 
us, and sometimes for all of us, action cannot 



106 



A YEAR OF MIRACLE. 



mean doing, then remember hearing \ too, is 
action, often its hardest part. 

" I am not eager, bold, or strong, — 
All that is past ! 
I am ready not to do, 
At last — at last ! " 

When that verse comes into the psalm of life, 
as, sooner or later, it must come, let us remem- 
ber that not-to-do icell is a noble well-doing. 
But either by doing or by bearing we must act, 
in order to harvest anything. Action is to 
thought and feeling what the leaf is to the 
crude sap : then of action habit is the blossom, 
and of habit character is the fruit. Character is 
the concentrated result of life, its organized de- 
posit, its harvest in us, and the seed of after-life. 

Between the bearings and the doings, our 
years are passing fast. Death is predetermined 
in our frames as in that of the leaves. From 
ten to twenty, we hardly know it. From twenty 
to thirty, we know, but little care. At thirty, 
we begin to care ; for already June is well-nigh 
past! Are we leafing yet? Are we only leaf- 
ing? Or are we so leafing that life's autumn 
shall find us rich in pleasant fruit ? Are ice 
ripening Seed/ 



